By Politico · October 19, 2026
California’s voter ID measure is falling short of majority support, with likely voters deeply divided along party lines, according to a new Citrin-POLITICO poll.
Fifty-one percent of likely voters polled said they would vote against Proposition 39, which would require Californians to show ID at polling places and add the last few digits of an ID number to mail-in ballots. Forty-two percent said they would vote in favor of it, while 7% remained undecided.
Those results are in line with September polls from the Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies and the Public Policy Institute of California, both of which had the measure losing by similar margins.
Voter ID has long been a priority of President Donald Trump. And while proponents of the California measure have sought to distance the campaign from the president, it remains highly polarizing.
Eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they would vote ‘no,’ while 92% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they’re prepared to vote ‘yes.’ Independents favor the measure by a small margin, 45% to 41%.
“The independents, they’re very divided and they slightly lean to the yes side, but not by enough of a margin to make a difference, given the partisan division,” said Jack Citrin, a University of California, Berkeley, political science professor and co-director of the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll.
In the survey, 40% of registered voters said the measure, if passed, would make voting more secure, while 38% said it would make it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot. Ten percent said it would have both effects, while 7% said neither.Assessments were more critical in a concurrent survey of POLITICO’s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state — including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others deeply versed in California’s political landscape. Just 15% of those influentials said the measure would make elections more secure, while 69% said it would make it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot.
Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who is leading the push for voter ID, has long cast the measure as bipartisan, despite Democratic opposition. In an effort to court voters across the political spectrum, the campaign has run television ads featuring people talking about their Democratic and independent affiliations and bashing Trump.
By contrast, the No side has played into the partisan divide, calling Prop 39 a MAGA “power grab” and tying it to Trump’s vocal opposition to mail-in voting.
Gavin Newsom, a co-chair of one of the No committees, says in a TV ad that Prop 39 “is a ploy by Trump’s billionaire allies to make it harder to vote and easier to throw out valid ballots.”